Wisconsin lake · state assessment record
Lac Vieux Desert
In Vilas County. Assessment decisions reported by Wisconsin to EPA under Clean Water Act sections 303(d) and 305(b), last assessed in the 2024 reporting cycle.
- 4,400
- Assessed acres
- Lake, Freshwater
- Water type
- Mesotrophic
- Reported trophic class
- 80.5 ft
- Gage Height (provisional)
This waterbody in one line
Lac Vieux Desert, a lake in Wisconsin, is assessed as fully supporting its designated uses, with no impairment causes listed in the state's most recent Integrated Report cycle (2024). By assessed acreage it sits among the largest 5% by assessed acreage nationally (38,628 lakes); its impairment list is shorter than on half of assessed lakes (0 listed causes). Aquatic life is assessed as fully supporting. Fish consumption is assessed as fully supporting. A USGS gauge tracks its gage height daily.
- Fully Supporting
- overall status
- P98
- Assessed size nationally
- P51
- Shorter cause list
- Fully Supporting
- aquatic life
Assessment verdicts are the state agency's decisions as reported to EPA ATTAINS; PlainLakes renders them without modification.
A composite of this record's EPA ATTAINS designated-use verdicts, filed impairment count, and assessment currency, weighted and benchmarked against the national corpus of assessed active waterbodies. This is a water-quality standing, not a human-recreation or property-value judgment, and dimensions with no filed verdict drop out rather than count against the score.
Where Lac Vieux Desert stands in the filed register
Paragraphs are selected by this unit's percentiles and use matrix: different lakes lead with different dimensions. Figures are ATTAINS / portal register arithmetic, not advice.
The signature stat: cause-list length
The standout filed fact is a short cause list: 0 causes, shorter than 51% of assessed lake-type units. A short list can mean a focused impairment, or a shallow assessment.
Large assessed unit
At 4,400 acres, Lac Vieux Desert clears the upper tercile of assessed lake-type units with an area on file (697 still larger). Size comparisons use the portal's deduplicated lake ranking population, not raw ATTAINS row counts.
Every filed use clears the bar
The filed use determinations for fish consumption, recreation, aquatic life are all Fully Supporting. Where an overall IR category still flags the unit, look at the cause list and report standing rather than treating the use row as empty.
Large within Wisconsin
Among Wisconsin's 1,170 indexed units with an area, Lac Vieux Desert ranks 22 by assessed size, toward the large end of that state file.
IR category in the supporting band
EPA's Integrated Report category for Lac Vieux Desert is 2. In ATTAINS that band means the assessed uses are supporting (or supporting with other waters in the unit), so the narrative weight shifts to how deep the assessment went and whether monitoring is current, not to a restoration plan.
According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's ATTAINS program, Wisconsin carries 19,871 filed lake-type waterbodies in the August 2026 extract, and this page renders the assessment record EPA assigned to Lac Vieux Desert without modification. See our methodology for reporting-unit limits and gauge linking rules.
The record
Designated-use assessments
Fully Supporting and Not Supporting are the state's definitive verdicts; other entries mean the use was not conclusively assessed in this cycle. The latest monitoring Wisconsin filed against this record runs through 2023. For the definitive verdicts on this record, Wisconsin filed the assessment basis as Monitored Data. Those are EPA's own words, not PlainLakes' summary of them. Wisconsin filed its own confidence on the 3 definitive verdicts it rated: Good and Excellent. That rating is the filer's, in EPA's own field, and EPA publishes no definition of the four words it offers.
| Designated use | Group | Verdict |
|---|---|---|
| Fish Consumption | Fish-consumption or fishery | Fully Supporting Filer confidence: Excellent |
| Fish and Aquatic Life | Aquatic-life or related | Fully Supporting Filer confidence: Good on physical/chemical; Excellent on biological |
| Recreation | Recreation | Fully Supporting Filer confidence: Good |
| Public Health and Welfare | Recreation | Not Assessed |
| Wildlife | Aquatic-life or related | Not Assessed |
The record
Listed impairment causes
The state's reported assessment lists no impairment causes for this lake.
Reading the record
Lac Vieux Desert: Category 2 reading
2 Category 2: some uses supported, others not assessed
Wisconsin filed this assessment unit as Category 2: some designated uses are supported and others were not assessed in this cycle. Absence of a failing verdict is not the same as a full Category 1 finding.
Scale and rank
Lac Vieux Desert is one of 19,871 lake-type waterbodies reported to EPA from Wisconsin, and one of 1,219 whose reported record carries enough populated assessment or gauge data for this site to list and index it. At 4,400 assessed acres it ranks 698th by assessed size among the 38,628 lakes the dataset carries an area for, counting a state’s repeated filings of one water once, behind 697 lakes with a larger one.
Water level
A USGS gauge tracks this lake's gage height daily, and the latest reading is 0.07 ft below the reading 30 days earlier, against a 365-day observed range of 1.2 ft.
Reported trophic class
Mesotrophic is the trophic class the filing agency reported to EPA ATTAINS for this assessment unit. It describes nutrient enrichment, not whether the water is safe, and it is not a PlainLakes inference. What the trophic scale measures.
Water level: 365-day record
Daily gage height values, feet above this gauge’s own local zero, not above sea level, from USGS gauge 05390100 (Lac Vieux Desert Near Land O'Lakes, Wi), shown weekly. Readings are daily-batch snapshots, not real-time conditions.
- Latest reading
- 80.5 ft 0.06999999999999318ft vs 30 days earlier
- 2026-08-15 · Provisional, subject to USGS revision
Water level: 365-day record
Subscribe to water level updates for Lac Vieux Desert (RSS)
89 of the 354 daily values in this window (25%) are provisional and subject to USGS revision; USGS has approved this gauge's record through 2026-05-18.
Full gauge record: USGS monitoring location 05390100
In context
Where Lac Vieux Desert sits nationally
Assessed size among U.S. lakes
Distribution of assessed acreage across ATTAINS lakes filed with an area, counting a state’s repeated filings of one water once
4,400 Top 2% larger than 98% of 38,628 lakes
lakes the dataset carries an area for, counting a state’s repeated filings of one water once, bucketed by value
Source EPA ATTAINS · Reporting cycles 1987–2026
Listed causes vs waterbodies carrying a verdict
How many impairment causes U.S. waterbodies with a reported verdict carry
0 Among the shortest cause lists fewer listed causes than 51% of 23,610 waterbodies carrying a verdict
named waterbodies carrying a verdict, bucketed by value
Source EPA ATTAINS · Reporting cycles 1987–2026
In both charts each bar is a band and taller bars hold more waterbodies; the dashed line and filled bar mark Lac Vieux Desert. Hover or tap any bar for its full count and share.
In context
Wisconsin context
ATTAINS carries 19,871 lake-type waterbodies in Wisconsin, 493 assessed as not supporting at least one use and 4,225 fully supporting. Among the 1,219 indexed units there, Lac Vieux Desert ranks 492nd by listed-cause count (no listed causes) and 22nd by assessed size among the 1,170 with an area filed; it is one of the 4,225 fully-supporting indexed records in the state .
| Other large assessed lakes in Wisconsin | Assessed acres |
|---|---|
| Lake Winnebago Not Supporting | 131,942 |
| Lake Pepin Not Supporting | 25,503 |
| Petenwell Lake Not Supporting | 23,001 |
| Lake Poygan Not Supporting | 14,024 |
| Lake Chippewa Fully Supporting | 13,616 |
| Turtle Flambeau Flowage Not Supporting | 12,943 |
Peers near Lac Vieux Desert's size or cause load
Similar assessed acres
Nearest filed extents (4,400 acres here).
- Elk City Lake · 4,400 acres · KS
- Thomas Hill Reservoir · 4,400 acres · MO
- Lake Stamford · 4,399 acres · TX
- Millerton Lake · 4,398 acres · CA
Similar cause load
Nearest listed-cause counts (0 here). Peers already in the acreage column are omitted.
- 31st Street Harbor · 0 causes · IL
- 42nd Avenue East Beach · 0 causes · MN
- 59th Street Harbor · 0 causes · IL
- 657 Dunleavy (Beach) · 0 causes · MI
What to do with this record
- Assessment verdicts are cycle-based, not real-time. For fish-consumption decisions, your state advisory program is the binding source. Consumption status guide
- Water levels shown are daily snapshots. Seasonal drawdown and datum conventions matter when comparing levels. How to read level data
- Impairment listings follow the Clean Water Act 303(d) process; a listing is a regulatory finding, not a closure notice. 303(d) explained
PlainLakes renders state assessment decisions and federal gauge observations without modification. It does not issue advisories.
Assessment decisions on this page are rendered directly from state Integrated Report records in EPA's ATTAINS system; gauge figures are daily-value observations from the USGS National Water Information System, no number is typed in by an editor. Overall status, use verdicts, and causes are the state's reported decisions for assessment unit WI10007632. Counts and percentiles are computed across all lake-type records PlainLakes ingests from ATTAINS. See our editorial standards & corrections policy, the methodology behind these numbers, or report a data error. Data current as of 2026-08-17. Primary sources: EPA ATTAINS and USGS National Water Information System.